McAlister posted:

Ambition is not tolerated in women in our society.

Simple challenge. Name a movie with a heroine who is openly ambitious, portrayed in a positive light, without being a rape-and-revenge trope, that isn't based on a real woman.

Some examples of movies that do not meet this challenge:

Hunger Games - Katniss spends the whole series being tricked/used into being a symbol of rebellion. She has no personal goals beyond her own survival.

Kill Bill - kiddo is good now because upon becoming pregnant she gave up being an assassin and settled down. Her flashbacks to when she pursued her ambitions were when she was an evil assassin.

Erin Bronkovitch - based on a true story.

Every royal female character - being born to power and trying to do a good job is not aspiring to it or asserting that you are better suited than others to it.

Flashdance - based on a true story.

X-men - being born to power isn't aspiring to it. Also the good female mutants are almost never protagonists and constantly have horrible drawbacks to their powers that cause them to mope around all the time whining about wanting to be normal.

Black Swan - could have been a Rocky style movie about a woman striving to become an amazing ballerina the way Rocky wanted to become a great fighter ( and the way the star of flashdance did ). But instead she's a nervous wreck being driven to dance to please her shrew of a mother.

Ambition in a female character always heralds their status as a villain. Heroes can venture out to "win" a throne - and presumably a hot princess - in our stories but not heroines. If a woman specifically seduces princes they are a heartless evil gold digger. Unlike Heros who can cheerfully take the quest to win the hand of the princess - thereby becoming the next king - without worrying overmuch what the princess thinks about all this.

It's incredibly difficult to even find a training montage about a female character. The montage period gave boys a gazillion training montages in everyone from chess to skiing and gave girls makeover montages in which they passively sat there while other people made them pretty. Kill Bill has training montages from flashbacks to evil kiddo. Rape-and-revenge trope chars have them to gain the skills to enact revenge. There are a few "involuntary training" montages where someone else forces a female character through training of some kind. There are a poo poo ton of "magical girls" who "OMG, I'm good at this? Neat. I've never practiced at it" like the adorable heroine of Butter who was an accomplished child sculpter with no instruction. And now there are plenty of skilled female chars who presumably worked hard at some time in the past to become good - but the story of them pushing themselves for their own advancement is never told. Starbucks, Brienne, and Vasquez simply are. Sprung into being fully formed.

You see the same thing in real life where most female athleticism is presented as art only - the vicious competition happens behind the scenes in the auditions. All you see is the victors take their victory laps in shows. Think about how elegant she looks as she twirls. Not about the rivals she crushed to get there.

So we have been conditioned since our earliest days to associate "ambitious woman" with "villain" because in all the stories we hear and see ... well they almost always are. Real life isn't like the movies which is why movies based on real life buck this trend. But the net effect means that the neural pathways in your brain between the concepts of ambition, woman, and evil are well worn and if two light up the third is raring to go.